Across Four Countries to Rescue Her Grandson
In March 2022, Liudmyla Siryk was trying to reach her daughter, Snizhana. Weeks had passed with no word from her.
Russia had launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine the previous month, and Snizhana was trapped in Mariupol with her children, unable to leave.
Before the war, Mariupol had been a busy industrial city in southern Ukraine on the Sea of Azov. By March 2022, it had become a nightmare. Russian forces had surrounded the city, and relentless bombardment struck apartment buildings, hospitals and streets where civilians were trying to survive. The International Committee of the Red Cross described conditions as apocalyptic, with residents sheltering in basements for weeks, often without electricity, running water or reliable access to food.
Snizhana was inside that siege with her son Oleksandr Radchuk — known to the family as Sasha or Sashko — and her younger child. There was no safe way to evacuate.
On 24 March 2022, a missile exploded near Sasha. Shrapnel tore into his face, seriously damaging one of his eyes.
"A shell hit my house. And my eye started to burn terribly," he later recalled.
In the chaos, Snizhana left her younger child with relatives and rushed Sasha to the only medical help still available in the besieged city: a makeshift clinic run by Ukrainian military medics inside a steel plant. For more than two weeks, mother and son sheltered there, cut off from the outside world, with no electricity and no way to contact their family.
In April 2022, Russian forces surrounded the plant. Along with the Ukrainian soldiers defending it, Sasha and his mother were forced to surrender.
“We came out. It was night-time, but I could see the destroyed buildings all around us. They put my mum and me in a Russian KAMAZ lorry. It was very scary. But I thought they’d let us go, because we’re civilians,” Sasha told his story to DW.
Instead, Russian soldiers loaded them onto military trucks and took them to what became known as a “filtration camp” — a processing site where Russian forces screened civilians from occupied areas, confiscated their documents and phones, questioned them, and decided who would be released and who would not.
Human rights organisations and journalists have documented that thousands of Ukrainians passed through these camps during the war, while many others disappeared after entering.
“The Russians told me that my mum didn’t need me, that I would be given to a foster family in Russia. Imagine – they didn’t even let me say goodbye,” Sasha recalls.
Sasha was taken to occupied Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine that has been under Russian control since 2014. There, he remained in hospital without his mother, without identity documents, and without any way to contact his family.
Sasha has not seen his mother since.
A journey through four countries
Hundreds of kilometres away in Ukraine's Chernihiv region, Liudmyla still had no idea whether her daughter or grandson were alive. Then came a breakthrough. While being held in Donetsk, Sasha managed to borrow a stranger's phone and call his grandmother. The conversation lasted less than a minute.
“I begged a guy for a phone and quickly, in the toilet, called my grandmother – literally for one minute – and told her where I was,” Sasha recalled.
Liudmyla immediately began preparing to travel into occupied territory to find him. People warned her that she could be detained in Russia. She went anyway.
Because Russian forces had blocked direct travel between government-controlled Ukraine and occupied territory, her journey took her across four countries. She travelled through Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Russia before finally reaching occupied Donetsk.
When she found her grandson, she promised he would not be alone anymore and that they would continue searching for his mother together.
"I hugged him and told him: my child, now you will be with me," she later said.
Both grandchildren are now living with Liudmyla while her daughter’s fate has remained unknown since April 2022. Her family has repeatedly asked Russian authorities where she was and why she was taken, but has received no answer, and Russia has not acknowledged her detention.
Part of a larger pattern
Sasha's case is not unique. Ukraine has identified around 20,000 children who were forcibly taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory during the war. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's commissioner for children's rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children — a practice human rights groups have documented extensively since.
Russia does not disclose where these children, or detained adults like Snizhana, are being held. Even international organizations have not been granted access to verify their whereabouts or condition. Despite this lack of information, investigators and human rights lawyers have documented dozens of facilities across Russia and Russian-occupied territory where Ukrainian children have been held. Rights groups say Russia has followed a similar pattern with Ukrainian civilians, including Snizhana, detaining them without disclosing their location or status to families or international monitors.
For families like Liudmyla's, the search continues. They are still waiting for their loved ones to return — or simply for confirmation that they are alive.
